


Not For One Day

by cgf_kat



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst, Drama & Romance, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Tragic Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-06
Updated: 2018-05-06
Packaged: 2019-05-03 06:58:18
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,825
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14563509
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cgf_kat/pseuds/cgf_kat
Summary: "You’re not supposed to know the end. Yours. You definitely never want to know it’s coming sooner than it should. Or so I thought."Lance and Pidge take an opportunity to catch a glimpse of the next ten years of their relationship, not at all expecting what they see. The question now is: what will Lance do with the knowledge? Lance POV





	Not For One Day

You’re not supposed to know the end. Yours. You definitely never want to know it’s coming sooner than it should. Or so I thought. 

When Pidge dragged me into the shop in the market, I didn’t really know what to expect. “Know The Next Ten Years Of Any Relationship!” the sign said. Know if your date is right for you, or if the friend you’re there with will stick around for the long haul. 

“I’ve heard people talking here, saying it’s not a hoax. That this shop is actually kind of a legend,” Pidge tells me. “But it has to be a hoax, and if somehow even part of it isn’t, I want to know how they’re doing it. I want to get some readings, and I need a partner to get in.”

“So you grabbed me?”

“You were the first one I found.”

“Either that, or you want me to see the next ten years of you making jokes about me all in one day,” I smirk.

She crosses her arms at me. “Are you going to help me indulge my curiosity or not?”

I make a flourishing motion forward. “Lead the way, by all means, my lady.” She smacks me in the arm for the last part - hard - but I’m laughing as I follow her, and I think I see her smile as she turns away to push through the door.

The small shop is supposed to look like a happy place, I guess, all bright colors and pictures of happy couples and laughing groups of friends, some of them giving thumbs up at the camera or standing happily in front of the shop’s sign. 

“Well that’s interesting…” I trail. “They sure seem to think it works.”

“Of course!” The sudden voice nearly makes me jump out of my skin, and Pidge yells and jumps back into me. The short little light blue older guy who comes out from the back of the shop raises his eyebrows in apology. “Oh, I am sorry. I did not mean to startle you.”

Pidge laughs awkwardly. “It’s fine! We just uhm...we’ve heard a lot about this place.”

“The young couple wishes to see their future?”

“No,” we both say immediately. “Friends.”

“Just friends,” Pidge stresses. 

“And we, you know, work together. Or whatever,” I add. 

“Ah, I see. Many friends come here! This is good as well. The price for a pair is 3,700 GAC, if you wish to try.”

I haven’t been able to work out a great conversion to any Earth currency, but I know that while that isn’t astronomical or anything, it isn’t cheap either. Not to mention we have no GAC to speak of anyway.

Pidge and I look at each other. Her eyebrows are up through her hairline, so I’m guessing she didn’t expect that. “Oh, uhm...well, maybe we can’t try, then…”

“I am sorry. The refined quintessence mixture that is used in the process is not easy to produce or to procure.”

“Quintessence?” Pidge asks. She gets that looks on her face - the instantly fascinated one - and I can’t help smiling. “You use quintessence for this?”

“Yes, of course. Even quintessence cannot allow travel through time, but, if refined in just such a way, and mixed with other elements, it can...pierce the veil. Allow a glimpse. Ten years is not an arbitrary number. It is as far as we can see as yet, with our science.”

“Oh...wow, that’s...really?”

“What is it, Pidge?”

She looks up at me, but not exactly “right” at me, like she does when she’s thinking hard. “If...I mean, what he’s saying actually makes sense. Quintessence, theoretically, with its properties I guess it could do that. This might...really be for real.”

I blink at her. “Really? How?”

“Exactly what he said. Just a glimpse. Not a rip in the time-space continuum, more like peeking through at a weak spot - or a weak spot that’s purposefully created around the next few years of the timelines of two specific people.” She looks over at the old guy again, excited. “Am I right? It’s somelike like that, isn’t it?”

He is already nodding. “Yes, exactly! More or less.” 

He peers at us more closely, and he seems to be studying the symbols on our armour. We don’t have helmets on, but we’re dressed as paladins because this is technically a publicity visit. Voltron freed this planet a couple of months ago from bickering Galra forces, but we didn’t have time to stay long then. There was another battle to fight. I guess they’re still using GAC because there’s really no other currency to use.

“This uniform you wear. It looks familiar. Are you, perhaps, of the paladins of Voltron?” he asks.

“Actually, we are,” I grin. I must be doing something Pidge doesn’t like, because she smacks my arm again. “What?”

The man seems excited by this. “You have freed us! We could not be more thankful to you. Come, come,” he says, waving us toward the back. “If you wish to try the process, you must try. Free of charge.”

“Wait,” Pidge says. “Are you sure? I mean, I’d love to have a look at the technology, if you wouldn’t mind, but you don’t have to waste any of your fuel.”

“It is not a waste! You have given my planet a future free of Galra rule; to give you a glimpse of your future is but a little thing I can do. Please, allow me to give you this experience if you desire it.” He’s smiling at us expectantly, hands clasped together. 

Pidge is already smiling widely, and I know she’s going to say yes. She’s too curious, and when she glances at me I shrug. 

“Let’s do it!” she says. “How does does this work?”

The old man brings us through a curtain into a room ringed by control panels, with a translucent tube in the center large enough for two people to stand in. There are markers for both sets of feet in the tube, and a thin pedestal in the middle with outlines for one hand from each person.

“You stand in the tube and place your hands on the pedestal,” he says. “The mixture is then injected into the chamber. Do not worry, the mixture itself is harmless - the part of it that is quintessence is not concentrated enough to cause harm or mental corruption.”

“So you guys know it can do that to people too, huh?” I ask. The story of Zarkon and Honerva that Coran told us still gives me shivers sometimes. 

“Oh yes, Quintessence can be very dangerous. We have our own refining methods - different from the Galra. Safer. That is why our planet was so valuable to them. They wished to discover our secrets.”

Pidge practically bounds up the couple of steps to the tube and through a door in one side of it. “Come on, Lance!” It’s nice seeing her so excited about something. She’s been a little down sometimes since her dad went back to Earth. 

“I’m coming, I’m coming.” There’s a door on the other side, too, and a nod from the blue guy confirms I should go in that way. I close the clear curved door behind me and find my footing on the markers. “And we just put our hands here?” I ask. I fit mine into the pedestal.

“Actually, it will work better if you can take off the gloves of the hands you place there. There is a conductive element to the process.”

Pidge and I pull off our right uniform gloves and place our hands back where they go. The little man is shuffling around the room flipping switches and inputting commands. The last thing he does is take a container of glowing blue-green liquid and insert it into a receptacle at the base of the tube. 

“That’s not a color of quintessence we’ve seen before is it?” I ask Pidge.

She’s practically bouncing on her toes by now. “No, it’s new. Must happen as part of their process. Maybe he’ll let me take a sample back to analyze…”

“You are having way too much fun already.”

She blushes when she laughs this time. Why is she blushing? It’s...it’s cute.

“Are you ready?” our host asks. Pidge gives him a thumbs up and I do the same without thinking about it. It’s not until the tube seals and the mixture begins seeping in at our feet as a gas that I start to have second thoughts. 

“Here goes nothing,” I mutter.

“Do not worry!” the old man says. He likes saying that. Now his voice is coming through a speaker here in the chamber. “The process is perfectly safe, perfected over many deca-phoebs, and we also have a serum to allow forgetting afterwards if necessary.”

“Okay…?” I say. I don't know whether that’s a good sign or a bad sign, but it does make me feel a little better. 

We fight. That’s what we do as paladins. There’s no telling what we’re going to see, even if it is only supposed to focus on the two of us. 

“Calm down, Lance, this is supposed to be fun,” Pidge teases. 

“Who’s not calm? I’m calm.” 

The gaseous mixture fills the tube around us, and the old man is telling us to breathe in deeply. Pidge smiles at me, we breathe, and that is the last moment I have before everything changes. 

In an instant, that smile becomes everything I see, multiplied across a thousand moments in a thousand places. 

I see her laughing in the dining room, gesturing excited at her desk in her hangar, whooping in victory - all things I’ve seen before, but it’s like I’m seeing them with new eyes. New scenarios very much like the old ones, but then things begin to change even more. 

All just glimpses. Brief feelings. Brushing too close and not pulling away. Laughing together over a dinner that isn’t in the castle. A walk on a beach with two moons above us. A kiss stolen under the shadow of the green lion in Pidge’s hangar. That laugh is for me now, not at me. 

I’m holding her in my room, pressing kisses to her hairline. I’m holding her where she has dropped to her knees in a corridor, both of us still in armor, both of us in tears, and I don’t know why. I’m holding her hand as we press into the observation deck’s window as the castle comes out of a wormhole above Earth. There are others around us, but I can’t quite see enough to know which of our friends have made it home. 

Earth. My family. Pidge is with me when I see them again, and they love her. My grandma asks when the wedding is, and it leave us both sputtering at her. But I see glimpses of a wedding, too. I can’t tell who is there, but Pidge is. Her hair has grown out, and she’s a little taller by then, and so much has changed in five years. Or has it only been five minutes? She is radiant and I feel like I could die just looking at her. 

“Katie Holt...you are my world. And I know I’m awful at this kind of thing, but I wanted you to know that from the night I pulled those headphones off your ears on the Garrison’s roof...I should have known I was starting the rest of my life. But I know it now, and I’m never going to forget it. Not for one day.”

“Not for one day,” she says to me. We fought by each others’ sides for years. There may be peace in the galaxy today, but we know we’re never guaranteed tomorrow. 

Earth. Oh, Earth...and our families. A small house on a tree-lined street. Some normal life, for once, after so many years of so much fighting. Cooking diner, stealing each others’ popcorn, cleaning bathrooms, lying in the grass in a park. Thinking about getting a dog and never making up our minds. Kisses behind trees. 

Hovering over Pidge’s shoulder as she works in a small office at the back of the house. Our house. Sometimes we argue, we’re not perfect, but in the end we work it out. I miss her when she travels for work. We used to go everywhere together when we were part of Voltron. Her picture is on my desk in my office at the Garrison. 

Reunions with friends, though I still can’t quite see the faces. Telling them they’re all going to be aunts and uncles. A birthday cake with three candles. A small, happy boy, with my hair and my facial structure and Pidge’s eyes and her smile. 

That smile. Nearly ten years since our first not-exactly-a-date, and that smile is still the center of my world. Or has it only been ten minutes? I would do anything for her, whatever the case. 

But...something coming out of warp above Earth that shouldn’t be there. Galra, maybe, but I can’t quite tell. Stray forces that resent the new peace? Gathered for revenge? A cannon. They have a cannon that could slice right through Earth itself if they wanted. 

“What is this, Star Wars!” I hear myself saying. My hand is clasping Pidge’s. The boy is huddled against my chest, looking up at the dark shape above the atmosphere. 

They are demanding surrender. There’s no choice but to fight. A wormhole opening, Allura and Coran and the castle, just in time. Voltron will fly again. 

We’re leaving the boy with Pidge’s parents, kissing his cheeks and hugging him before we have to run, run to a transport that takes us to the castle, to the lions, to Allura and our friends and a fight we wish we didn’t have to have.

I am kissing my wife in the corridor between hangars before we separate to go to our lions. It almost feels strange being in the armor again. “Not for one day,” I say to her.

“Not for one day.”

They’re ready for Voltron. They’ve done their homework. A calculated beam blows the lions apart, but we still fight individually. When we run out of options, the cannon’s shield is flickering and nearly done for. The cannon itself doesn’t have full power. It’s sputtering, too. A good blast and it will be done for. 

I’m going in with one other lion for a final run, not straight at it, but in a second the cannon has turned and a sputtering blast comes for me and Red, just as I fire. The cannon explodes but it’s final blast slices through the eyes of my lion and into the cockpit. Into me. 

Red will be okay, eventually, I think vaguely. I don’t know why I have that thought. But I won’t be. The energy ribbon is not nearly enough anymore to hurt a planet, but it’s more than enough for me. I think I scream. I’m toppling in space, blown out through the broken viewports. 

I think Pidge is calling for me, but my radio sputters out. Is my suit depressurizing? I don’t know. Everything hurts too much anyway. 

I can see the Earth passing as I spin. The Earth we saved. A shadow crosses the sun and I wonder if this is it. I’m at peace about it, but I don’t know why. 

Sudden gravity. Everything hurts more. The shadow...the shadow was the green lion. My helmet is coming off and there is air and arms are holding me. Pidge...Katie...you’re so beautiful. I don’t want to leave, but it’ll be all right. Don’t cry.

“It’s okay,” I whisper. “We did it right. We didn’t forget.”

“Not...n-not for one day,” she sobs. 

She kisses me and that is all there is. 

The vision ends and I am gasping. We’re back in the tube and I can’t breathe for anything. What happened? What was that?

“No!” Pidge cries. As I can focus my eyes again I realize she’s across from me, shaking where she stands. “N-No, that...that can’t be right…” She stumbles to the glass and pounds on it. “What did you do! What was that!”

“Pidge!” The door she’s banging on pops open, she’s toppling, but I lunge around the small pedestal in time to catch her around the waist from behind, to keep her from falling on her face. The movement feels natural. I can see her in my arms, laughing as I hold her easily like this, in the house that's ours, or outside watching the boy that looks like us playing. 

Neither of us is really breathing, I think. She sinks back into my arms and I don’t think she’s thinking about it. Like it’s natural for her, too. I feel...strange. I feel all at once both like a teenager who doesn’t understand and like a man fast coming up on thirty whose life has been abruptly cut short...who has another chance. 

“What…? What happened?” the little blue man asks. “Are you all right?”

Pidge is crying. I want to make it stop, but what can I do? I’m seventeen; I don’t know how to deal with crying girls.

But I’m not seventeen. I’m twenty-seven and this is my wife.

No...no, that’s not right either. 

“You said we could forget?” Pidge asks. “We need to forget! We need to…” She crumples and I am following her to the floor to ease her fall and I’m holding her now like I was in the corridor. Like I will hold her…

“Is it…?” My throat is dry, and I have to swallow before I can keep talking. “Is it always like this? I feel like I’m-I’m...like I’m two people...or…”

“Yes…” the man says. “But it does not last forever. The memories, even without the serum, will fade quickly in their intensity. They will soon be only faint impressions. A quintant or two at most, and you will only remember but a few things.”

“Like a dream…”

“Yes! Yes.”

But you can still remember some dreams, even years later. The intense ones. The ones you don’t want to remember, sometimes. And I don’t think I’ll forget this. Which is probably why they have the serum in the first place. 

“We have to forget all of it,” Pidge says forcefully. She’s not crying anymore, not really, but she hasn’t calmed, either. 

“I am so sorry. A result like this is not a common occurrence, I can assure you. If I had any inkling, I would not have suggested—”

“It’s not your fault, I get it! Please…”

“How long do we have to take the serum, before whatever of these memories that are gonna stick around set in for good?” I ask. 

Why am I the level-headed one right now? That’s not right. Why wasn’t I surprised in there, when I died? I didn’t want it to happen, but I realize I wasn’t surprised. It wasn’t a shock. Pidge is the one in shock. 

“Perhaps a quarter of a Varga or more.”

Fifteen or twenty minutes. I can work with that. “Okay, uhm, just...give us a few doboshes…?” He nods quickly and clears the room, and I tug Pidge gently to her feet to help get her focused. 

“Pidge. Pidge, look at me.”

She grips my arms, but she won’t look up at first. “Don’t try to convince me we shouldn’t forget. If that was even real, I am not going to sit around for ten years waiting for you to die, Lance.”

“If we know, maybe we can stop it.”

“Who’s to say knowing isn’t what makes it happen? Or that knowing wouldn’t make us make different choices that might lead to something worse happening even sooner? It’s too dangerous!”

“Pidge...Katie.” I’ve never called her that before, but I’ve been calling her that, sometimes, for ten years. Finally she meets my eyes, and something is different in them. She isn’t the same girl who walked into this shop. Not right now. Just like I’m not the same boy. I can read there the same confusion I’m feeling. 

“Even if…” I run out of air much too quickly. The seventeen year old part of my brain is screaming, panicking, but right now I have the calm of ten more years of maturity to help me. I swallow and get my breath again.

“Pidge, even if all of that was real, even if it all happens exactly the way we saw it...it’s...I think it’s okay. We did it right. We will do it right…”

“If we did it right then, we’ll do it right again,” she says. “We don’t have to remember right now. I can’t…”

Her face crumples, her breathing becomes labored again, and I pull her into an embrace. It’s so strange; neither of us is questioning that we will be together, even though I don’t think we really had those thoughts before now...except maybe, fleetingly. She was blushing before. Maybe she has, too. But we can’t question it, after that. Not right now. If we forget it may take a little time...but we saw that it won’t take long. 

“You’ll be okay,” I say into her hair. I don’t know if I’m myself talking to the girl who is only my friend right now, or the man talking to his wife. Maybe both. “You’re the strongest person I know, Katie. And you won’t be alone.” After I die.

I hold onto her until she’s breathing normally again. Until she pushes away enough to look up at me. She tries to laugh. “This is my fault. I dragged us in here.”

I laugh and kiss her forehead without thinking, because that’s what twenty-seven year old me would do, and Pidge leans into it with a soft smile, because that’s what twenty-five year old her would do. Then it’s awkward for a moment as our teenage selves realize what we did. 

Who are we? Are we them, now? For these few moments?

“I’m sorry,” I say.

“For dying? You’d better be…” 

She sniffs and wipes her face dry on her gloves, taking her glasses off to do it and then going to slide them back on. I stop her. She hesitates, but she stows them away in her armor instead. In most of the memories, she wasn’t wearing them. Not at all once we were on Earth. 

Our foreheads drift together, bumping softly as they touch, and we stand there for a little while, just together. I think it’s more for them than for us...but that doesn’t matter.

“You’re right,” I say finally. “We should forget.”

She nods, and then she is kissing me. At first it’s brief, and she pulls back with a gasp as if she’s apologizing. “Sorry! I just...I feel like I’m her, too...like...like I have to say goodbye for her. Because I can.”

“I know. Me too. It’s okay.” I kiss her then, really kiss her, and we hold each other and we fit together like two people who have had ten years of practice. Like it isn’t our first kiss. But it isn’t our first, is it? That’s still to come. 

This is our last kiss...isn’t it? Out of order, out of time. Because the universe is funny that way, and I still don’t know if I’m speaking to it right now. 

“I love you,” I say. I breathe it against her neck and again, it’s out before I think about it. I’m the man who died, saying goodbye while he can. “We’ll forget now because we have to, but we won’t when it counts. I promise.”

“Not for one day,” Pidge answers.

We put on the gloves we’d taken off in the chamber, and when we call the blue old man back, he has already prepared the serum, just in case. He comes in with a tray and two small glasses, and waves us back out into the lobby.

“Hurry, there is not much time left. You must take this if you are going to. Again, I am so sorry.”

We take the glasses, and just look at them for moment. We are still holding hands between us, but reluctantly we let go.

“Wouldn’t make any sense to us-half-a-varga-ago to suddenly find ourselves holding hands,” Pidge says, laughing anxiously.

“No, but you can bet I’m gonna ask you on a date soon.” I tap at a temple. “I’ll remember I need to do that, if nothing else. Just you wait.”

She smiles, tired but not as sad as she was a moment ago. “Good. You’d better.” She thinks for a few second. “Actually, little advice, you might want to start with a not-exactly-a-date.”

“What?”

“You’ll figure it out.”

We watch each other as we drink, together. We knock them back and Pidge swallows, and she’s looking into my eyes as hers glaze over. I see it all fade away. 

When she blinks and starts looking around in confusion, I spit the serum I held in my mouth back into the cup when she isn’t looking, and shove the cup behind something on a shelf beside me. The old man raises his eyebrows at me, but he doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t give me away. 

“Man,” Pidge says. “I guess we can’t try then. We don’t have any GAC, I’m sorry. But would you mind if I took a look at your equipment? Stuff like this fascinates me.”

“I...uhm, yes, of course. I would not mind,” the man says. “Right this way.”

“Great!” Pidge bounds after him into the back room, and I stay where I am. After a few moments the man comes back out through the curtain and peers at me. 

“You did not forget,” he says. 

It isn’t hard to explain. “In there...when we saw everything...I died, almost ten years from now, and I wasn’t surprised. Like I knew it was coming.” I sigh. “I think...I think I was always going to know.” 

I think for everything to turn out the way it did, I have to know. But my throat is clogging as my seventeen year old self starts to take precedence again. 

“Can...do you think there’s any way to change it?” I ask.

He shrugs solemnly. “I do not know. Usually those who want to remember are those who don’t want anything to change. There’s been no one to tell me if it’s possible.”

I nod in thanks, and that’s when part of me breaks. Just for a moment. The old man turns away and goes behind his counter to straighten things, giving me a semblance of privacy as I lean into the wall. My shoulders are shaking. I can’t see straight. When I catch my breath again my cheeks are damp, and I have to wipe them off. 

When I straighten and set my shoulders the man is looking at me. “I think I would have forgotten. You are brave.”

I look at the curtain Pidge disappeared through a few minutes ago. “For her...I think I can be anything.”

It’s funny, how your life can change in an instant. We’re not supposed to know the end. Not usually. But sometimes knowing the end can make the rest mean even more. 

Pidge comes out after a while, chattering away about the equipment in the back, loaded up with scans, and by the time she does I’m feeling a little more like myself. The pain in my chest has started to fade.

“Hey, Pidge,” I ask, once we’re out on the street. “How much longer until we have to track down the others?”

She glances down at her tablet. “A couple of vargas. Why?”

“Nothin’, you hungry?”

“Hungry?”

“Yes, Pidge. Hungry. Do you need food? I could eat. We should find food.”

“Food sounds great, maybe we can call the others and—”

“I uh...I kinda meant...just us…” She raises an eyebrow at me. “I mean you and I just don’t get a lot of time to hang out!”

“We play video games in your room religiously, Lance.”

“That’s not what I mean.” 

She smiles at me. That smile that will become my universe. “Lance, are you asking me out on a date?” she teases.

“No. Just a not-exactly-a-date.”

Pidge laughs, but trails off a little when she realizes I’m half serious. “Oh...well...I mean if it’s only not-exactly-a-date…” She starts blushing like she did before, back in the tube. “Sure, I guess.”

And the future opens up before us. She doesn’t know it now, but even if it’s only ten years, I plan to make it exactly like we saw it, and better. The rest of our lives start now, no matter what happens. 

I won’t waste any of it. Not for one day.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading! I appreciate any comments, and I answer them all if possible! Thank you again!


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